messages in bottles

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dear C: i miss you. you ever consider the fact of being in five big car and bike crashes (so far), and then consider that you've gone beyond whiplash and had at least five concussions in adulthood? and that you Can't venture again without crampons after an ice storm, risk bone bruising and head-slam repeats when slipping on ice on asphalt? you can't forget, even though your memory's narrator has become less reliable.

i like you describing me as a "lame love"--the edge we know you have the right to push with how intimately you've treated me, how public you've been about your own episodes of halting, encumbered and staggering movement. i like the humour, sincerity and agenda. and especially that you checked first and didn't assume it would feel ok to use that name.

more disabled folks have tried reclaiming "gimp" and "cripple" than "lame"--it still gets used casually by kids and adults as a putdown daily. so you know it requires explaining to potential allies: that i sometimes limp, my knees are damaged and mobility impaired even if i still can bike most of the time. we must remind all that's what it means, and that we pair it with love for how i physically operate. but it's never ok to make it an insult.

i don't like the difference in available phrases in French: oui, it's true we're atypique, but it seems disability community French speakers must still use English terms like "crip"--parallel radical reclaiming of charged language isn't public yet. so, we explain i call myself and disabled peers "crip" too; we do it to own it, and allies who love us can say, "my friends identify as crips," but check before saying, "hey, crip!"

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when i handwrite missives to you, i can practice standard capitalizing of letters in the sentences. editing is harder once marks go on paper: i have to ink out the words i choose against, and feel a bit stressed about sharing such imperfectly jotted letters.

as most of my words aren't handwritten, when i type i give myself a break from conventions of capitalizing, grammar, abbrev. terms, reduce keystrokes. it’s more accessible for me to not press fingers the extra amount required to type capitals. also, visually i can perceive typical bodies of text with capitals interspersed as a bit dense and less enjoyable to read.

since i shifted to allowing myself lowercase by default, i only add capitals when extra emphasis seems needed, or when i feel extra pressure to provide them for other readers’ sense of coherence, usually for correspondence or documents with business expectations. but not with you; you know how messy i get and you can handle it.

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yet sometimes folks with disabilities different from mine find my text adaptations end up harder for them to read. i hate when our differing accommodation needs end up in conflict; often not all folks affected can get theirs met satisfactorily at the same time. here’s a time i reckon with “there is no hierarchy of oppressions"--how can we be guided by this premise, and minimize harm?